The Morality Delusion
by JFK'd
Summary: "They say he brings out the worst in the boy like that's a bad thing."
1. The Sleeper

Chess is a game. water polo is a game. Murder is a crime, and you will go to jail for it.

The night the cops come knocking, they bring handcuffs and flashlights. They arrest him in his own home, and when Ma realises what he's done, she claps a hand over her mouth and falls silent, for the first time in a long time.

She listens to their accusations: counts of vandalism, affray, multiple charges of grand theft auto and misdemeanour murder. In the past year he has certainly made a name for himself. The cop who cuffs his hands tells Ma that down at the station, they call him 'the road runner', like that little cartoon bird.

He wasn't fast enough, though.

The last thing she says to him before they load him into the car and haul him off to the station is hard to catch, at first. She smacks him –and all the officers let her, saying 'it's her perogative' and stepping back. It isn't until they're halfway down the road that Scout realised what she'd said. _"This is how you repay me?"_

A debt is a debt, either way.

Down at the courthouse, the judge gives him a strange ultimatum. He says, "You can go to jail for five years, or you can go to a detainment facility in New Mexico for four."

There's no real difference to him. A debt is a debt. He looks at Ma, and then the judge, and shrugs. "I ain't never been to Albuquerque before."

There is silent in the courtroom. The judge clears his throat. "Very well." That's all it takes for Scout to sign away the rest of his life.

-

After the conviction, he gets to say his goodbye. It's brief, and sort of trite –Ma's eyes trembling with tears. Behind her, the remains of his brothers –Buddy heading the bunch, with Walt, Danny, Frankie, and Tony. Waker is long gone. Seymour, too.

It's nothing he hasn't survived. Hastily, trying to be passive and cold, he says his goodbyes with a mouthful of gravel –and blood, too, from biting down on his tongue. The boys wave him off with outwardly cold exteriors, staring down at the floor while they mumble. It doesn't matter: Scout knows they mean it. Ma's a mess, but she keeps it together.

She gives him Seymour's old tags –from Vietnam. Hidden from the others, of course, and she doesn't make a fuss of it.

"Hold onto these." She says. "Jus' until you get back. Awright?"

He never does get to reply.

They take him out to a shuttle, with the destination card in the window simply reading 'RED, NM'. That bemuses him, but more so is how empty the bus is. There are about 50 seats, and aside from the office escorting him, he is entirely alone. The spring is brisk, and it leaves the windows a wobbling view of the dusk outside. He doesn't know what he'll be outside of Boston.

The officer uncuffs his left wrist and he sighs. "Aw, man, thankyou. That's-"

Almost immediately, he is forced into the seat, and cuffed to the headrest in front of him. The cold of the metal is stifling, and he is left awkwardly slumped forward. "Hey!" He squawks, trying to stand, but struggling. Ultimately he fails, leant into the aisle, shackled to the headrest. The officer is now sat leisurely at the back of the shuttle, feet up, a newspaper on his lap.

Scout rattles his cuffs angrily. "Hey!" He says again, for good measure. "You ain't gonna let me siddown properly?"

In turn, the officer shakers the newspaper back at him. "You ain't gonna let me read peacefully?"

It takes him back, for a second. Scout is unused to being bitten in the same breath that he'd bite others with, and he doesn't like it. Not a bit. Almost recoiling, he tries to stand to some semblance of his full height, and juts his chin out in defiance.

"I got _rights_ to sit, y'know." He complains. The officer, now engrossed in the one of the smaller stories, shrugs one shoulder.

"You _had _rights. Then you went an' got jailed. Now-"The man licks the tip of his index finger and turns his page slowly, as if deeply invested in the story. "—you ain't got shit. The quicker you shut your face, the quicker we get to Albuquerque."

Scout gives serious consideration to another protest. But the moment he goes to open his mouth, the shuttle jerks into transit, and he falls into the aisle, snagged painfully by the cuffs. For one bright second of pain he thinks about yelling, but at the officer's chuckle, he decides on keeping quiet. The police have guns after all, and he learned from Seymour that if you think too much and ask the wrong men clever questions, it's a neat way to get yourself made.

After a second on the surly shuttle floor, he manages to heave himself up and clamber into the seat behind the headrest he' chained to. It takes a little leaning forward, but he manages to sit. Outside of the windows, Fenway is getting smaller and smaller, and home is becoming less recognisable ad they leave his parts of town, bound for unknown roads.

He might never have struck gold under concrete in Boston. But it's home: and it's disappearing before his helpless sight.

There is some pride in him, yet. The officer hasn't spotted Seymour's tags, slipped like a goodbye into his pocket. They don't jangle all that much –the fabric permitting, but knowing they're there puts him just the smallest bit at ease. Home might be far away from wherever 'RED, NM' is, but at least what remains of Seymour will be close by.

With that in mind, Scout tries to take his mind off of the whole arrest thing. It isn't quite late enough for him to dream of sleeping, and there's far too much going on for him to think. His only company –the office still reading the newspaper, is the only viable option.

Very slowly, as if testing for some lesser known, lesser recognised horror, he clears his throat. The response is virtually indistinguishable. Mustering wit, as he knows he'll need it, he tests out words.

"Y'know what time it is?" He asks, trying to twist in the chair. It is awkward, but he manages the task to some degree. Of course, his efforts are in vain almost entirely. The officer looks on as if Scout were silent, or dead. "You got a watch, hey? Hey, chief?"

It's all he can seem to say. Eventually, with a mechanical action, the officer wrenches his wrist up and gives the watch on it a long and very cold glance. Without looking up, the man grins out "Eleven eighteen,".

The streetlights concur. Scout tries to sit up. "What time are we gettin' there?" He swallows. "To Albuquerque, I mean."

The officer sighs, and lifts his watch again. The pause is awkward and unsettling. "About nine." That doesn't dishearten him. If anything, it's a sunnier and more optimistic prognosis than he had anticipated, and it makes him brighten, visibly. Scout leans back as best he can, given the cuffs, and nods.

"That ain't so bad." He settles. The officer laughs.

"Thirty-four hours with nothin' but road an' a newspaper? Maybe that's your idea of luxury, but it sure ain't mine."

Suddenly, he is no longer conscious of transit and something heavy lands of the brakes of life. He swings forward, and practically open, in shock. "Thirty-four hours!" He explodes, just about standing. "What the hell am I supposed to do for thirty-four hours?"

The officer shrugs. "You oughtta thought about that before you went an' broke the law. You been dropped to the bottom of the pile now, an let me tell you there ain't a side a' the tracks more wrong then under 'em."

"I ain't-" He nearly defends himself, but catches the rest of the sentence and swallows it. The taste is bitter and nasty, but the poison is slow –a dull ache. It won't kill him to keep quiet yet. Maybe he isn't a murderer. But the sum of every other sin of his is heavier, darker. Maybe it would be better to have killed a man instead.

Instead, Scout sits down, slowly, and tries to focus on the passing scenery. He has to pass through alot of states before getting to NM. The least he can do is soak in the sights.

-

When Scout is told they have an hour left, he's almost excited. Not to reach his destination –no, perish the thought –but to end his wretched journey.

Dirt isn't much to get excited about.

They've been driving through what's known as 'the badlands' for nearly an hour now, and it all looks exactly the same. Even to the keenest of eyes, Scout can only see empty expanses of dry, dry desert, and the distant shape of shadows and brambles clutching to red rock formations. There are no gas stations. No birds. Not even the most basic sign of life; water.

He wonders if the whole thing has been some clever ruse. That he's going to be dropped in the middle of the desert, without food and water, and left to die. Maybe that's the nature of RED's debt collections. They have been driving for some small eternity, and Scout hasn't even seen a payphone.

The shuttle is effectually a tin can. Where he'd shivered in the chilly East Coast spring, he now affords no such luxury. The cuffs are stiflingly hot. They burn if he leans hard against them for even a second. From sleeping in such a slumped position, his neck is incredibly tender. But Scout can't even lift a hand to rub it. Instead, he's left to quietly swelter.

"Hey, is there-" The officer at the back of the bus is slumped back, mouth ajar, looking unimaginably bored. His body is limp against the seat letting each jut and rattle of the bus sustain him. Scout realises he's asleep.

For a second, Scout thinks about making out of the emergency back door and running. After all, there's not a cop on any beat he can't outrun.

Then again, there's nothing to run to, and even the longest headstart Scout would be likely to receive wouldn't be enough. He can see the gun holstered on the office. Hell, Scout is fast, but he can't outrun a bullet.

Distracted, he doesn't notice the shuttle breaking until he lurches forward, nose-first into the headrest he's cuffed to. His yelp wakes the officer up with a start, who clears his throat, spits, and stands.

"We're here, Daley. On your feet."

Scout tries, at the very least. Blindly, he grapples with the seat until he can haul himself up. The officer comes around him and uncuffs him from the seat, and then re-cuffs his hands together. Still dizzy from the whack to the nose, and mildly alarmed by what feels like blood under his nose, Scout grunts.

He tests the cuffs petulantly. "This really necessary?" He asks. "I mean, where am I gonna go?"

He gets a hard shove in the back for his trouble. "Standard procedure. Keep it movin'." The shoving continues until Scout shuffles out into the dusty air, onto the dusty ground, before a wire-mesh fence surrounding two very dusty buildings. One is an industrial blue, with cylinders and sleek, sharp shapes. The other is a tall, organic timber building. The architect must have been in two minds about that one.

The architect isn't what springs to Scout's mind. What captures and sustains his attention is the full-frontal entropy of the war zone beyond the fence. He can see rockets, and hear a flickering gunnery, worse than screams but no less bright. It comes together so suddenly, and climactically that he is paralysed. Lost.

"Chief, this don't look like no detention facility I ever seen." He says, very softly. Half-expecting a grunt, he finds solidarity in the officer's stunned silence.

"Me, neither, kid." And then, after a few more seconds, he grunts out. "And she don't look like no warden, either."

-

In the cool office, she gives him only the assumed pseudonym 'Miss Pauling'.

And she seems delighted to have Scout there.

"I've been anticipating your arrival, Mister Daley." She says to him, warmly. Her hand gestured to the chair in front. "Feel free to sit. The journey coming in is always hellish."

The officer goes to sit, and she pauses. "Excuse me." Her voice becomes softer. "Your services are no longer required."

As if penalised, the man stiffens, nods shortly, and leaves with the smallest amount of delineation. There are never any questions asked. From what Scout has already seen, he's too intimidated to do so.

Looking up, Miss Pauling is offering him a cold coca cola. He takes it, gratefully. "I'm so glad to have you join us at Mann Co. When I heard about your trial –the 'fastest boy on the east coast', I simply had to inquire."

Scout pauses. His frown sets in very slowly. Very slowly, he finds his words. "I-" it's the best he can do. Sun-drowsed, dehydrated and fatigued, his focus is poor. "I'm supposed to be servin' a sentence. I didn't sign up to no-"

She sits across from him. "They'd waste you in an institute." Is her line of conversational seduction. At his unresponsiveness, she enumerates further. "You are a man of particular talents. We're offering you-...a way out."

He squirms in his seat. The whole thing doesn't sit right with him. Perhaps it's some kind of test. Or some kind of pretence, before they get the others to start shooting at him. The grounds were more furious than any blitzkrieg earlier, and scout doesn't feel a burning desire to contribute.

His voice is dry, but it raises at his behest. "But-" He swallows. "I'm supposed to be in jail. To be –to be repayin' my debt to society." After a moment, he adds. "Or somethin'."

Miss Pauling becomes very solemn. "Mister Daley –I may call you that, mayn't I?-I am offering you a time-sensitive deal. Four years, and I can wipe away the debt. A new start. A clean record." At his silence, she repeats herself a little. "Four years, and you can consider that debt repaid."

Scout fidgets. "Are you some sorta shylock?"

Her eyes narrow for a second, but she doesn't give him any more than that. Reaching for an ashtray, she lights a cigarette. "It's not that kind of debt."

Scout swallows. "What do you know about it, anyhow?"

The woman looks at him for a moment, before opening a drawer to her left and pulling out a thick, gray folder. Laying it on the table, she opens a tab and opens the cover sheet. Scout can see fingerprints, and a booking photograph, and some writing but can't read it upside down.

That's not a problem. She readers it aloud –so much the better.

"Daley, Scout. Twenty-three years of age. Height; five seven. Weight: approximately 150lbs. A history of assault, misdemeanours and affray. Track athlete. Record holder at Fenway High for the 100m, 200m, 400m and 1500m."

She pauses a moment to exhale and tip some ash daintily into the ray before continuing.

"Youngest of eight to Teresa Moretti and the late Patrick Daley. Eldest brother commits suicide at the age of thirty-one, third-oldest dies serving in Vietnam –I think that's rather enough, don't you?"

He shrugs one shoulder.

She persists. "I'm not trying to threaten you, Mister Daley. I'm trying to offer you a way out. This is not a detention facility. It's a place where your particular talents may be made useful."

He holds up a hand. "Lemme get this straight." After a moment of careful deliberation, he rests his chin in his hand. "You wanna use me –'cause I can run—for whatever. Sure." The nod she gives him inclines him to take the hypothesis to an accusation. "What's in this for me?"

Miss Pauling laughs, very quietly. Her amusement is not sinister, but rather sunny. She quiets herself, not because she is mirthless, but because it appears she doesn't want to embarrass him. "What's in this for you?" She repeats, and at his nodding, continues. "Well, aside from taking a year off of your sentence and giving you complete mobility within the grounds and surrounding areas, We also offer a handsome financial motivation, as you like."

His silence seems to stifle her. The promise of money does not encourage or discourage him from talking, which is unusual, at the very least. "If you have any other terms you'd like us to commit to, I suggest you avail yourself of them."

That grabs his attention. "I jus' figure-…" Awkwardly, he wrenches one shoulder up and drops it in a dispassionate shrug. "I jus' figure that I don't really need money. What with there being nothin' to buy around here anyway. But if you could send it to my Ma-"

Miss Pauling waves her hand –cigarette and all- in a pleasant but dismissive gesture. It leaves a horizontal trail of smoke burning through the air for a second. "Consider it done."

From underneath the thick file she pulls out a crisp white piece of paper and scans through it, as though checking. Scout's eyes never leave the folder, afraid that the paper is swelling with his indignities; or the truths he'd laid to rest when they buried Seymour. He was told they'd punish Seymour for the same sin Scout has indulged in: not for killing a thousand men, but daring to love a single one. But Miss Pauling doesn't say a word of guidance either way.

She smiles tightly at him. "Should you choose to take a contract out here, you'd be bound to four years of service for Reliable Excavation Demolition. The working day is from nine to five, six days a week." She carefully skips over any details of the work to be done, moving right ahead to something else. Scout won't dare stop her. "Expenses like food and accommodation are paid for, and are all taken care of on-site."

She takes the piece underneath to the front and resumes reading. "We travel a few times within a year –this isn't negotiable, I'm afraid. But we usually go during July, when the badlands are the least bearable. Don't worry –at any of our outposts, we have a mail service and access to a telephone." She only stops to breathe. Scout is unable to take most of it in. His silence gives him away.

"Have I been unclear?"

Scout swallows. He never has liked asking questions, but feels the heavy weight of necessity in this one. "It's not that." He says. "You jus' ain't exactly said what it is I'm actually gonna be doin' all day."

Never to be caught out or even outdone, she pauses, and then laughs. "No, no, quite right. It must have slipped right past me." For a moment, she ponders in thoughtful silence, as if wondering how to word bad news so that it appears brighter and altogether less insidious.

But Scout can call her bluff. For he knows –as well as any one person can, that anybody can be a villain with the right storytelling.

Her words are purposefully vague. "Oh, reconnaissance work, mainly." It isn't nearly enough.

"They never said nothin' about this down at the courthouse."

It doesn't falter her in the slightest. With an unblinking fierceness implicit in her genial manner, Miss Pauling leans forward and smiles. "I'm afraid you already signed your next four years over to me." She crushes out her cigarette.

There's an inch of threat in her statement, a dangerous foot-in-door that leaves him to draw in a sharp breath. "What about you?" He asks her. "Where d'you come in to all this?"

"I make the ends meet.." She says to him, simply. "That's all you need know."

"But-"

She raises her hand in a very slight warning. "If I wanted you to learn my life story, Mister Daley, I'd write my memoirs." Miss Pauling stands. "I'm assigning you to the RED group. I'll see to it that you get a uniform by this afternoon."

Scout has the awful feeling he's about to be left alone. "What about me?"

She turns, as if she had forgotten about him. "Oh, Mister Daley." She pauses for thought in a moment. "You'll have to have a physical examination before anything."

One of her fingers presses down a small red button by the telephone, one of many in a row, and picks up the receiver. She presses it to her ear, and smiles when the sound comes through. "..yes? Yes, he's here. Thursday, if not sooner…alright. Would you mind ever so much? I'm terribly busy, and –certainly! Yes, of course."

She looks at him, and then nods. "Bidwell will escort you down to the infirmary."

That's the only thanks he gets.

-

The man in the suit reminds of Seymour. The bookish sort. Not of many words. Both of them have this distant, glazed look in their eyes, like they're perfectly content in some other space, dreaming away, far away from the rest of them. They even look alike, too. A 'sensible haircut', tall, slim, with a crooked sort of mouth that half-smiles by itself.

The only real difference, of course, is that the man in the suit, Bidwell, is still very much alive.

He never says anything. He just walks Scout down to a small area of white tile and chairs, outside a set of double-doors. And then, just like that, he turns to go.

it makes Scout panicky. He calls after the man. "Hey?" He stays on the spot, helplessly. "Hey, am I s'pposed to go in or somethin'? Or –or wait? Hey! Hey, chief!" No friendly hint of answer is given. The man continues to walk, as if he hasn't heard at all, and it makes Scout angry. He demands an explanation for something.

Anything, even. Anything would do.

He leans heavy against the wall, and grumbles, "Stuffed shirt." Through two port-hole windows in the door, he can view the very bright lights of some small station. It looks to him like the nurse's office in his old highschool. He feigned sickness often and saw a lot of it, not for the attention, but for the nurse. She wasn't all that young, but she was pretty, and attentive. She reminded him of Ma, a little.

He can't see any pretty nurses inside there at all.

After a while, he resigns to sitting, because he lacks the nerve to enter. It's ironic, he thinks, that he could smile away in court, and turn white at the suggestion of the unknown. In his mind, it's justifiable, of course. Everything he does is. Realistically, he tells himself, who can afford to trust doctors?

Even sitting is dull after a while. He rises, deciding that enough is enough, and begins to wander back the way he came. The hallways are long and identical, and it makes him feel smaller. They turn off at places, and in his wandering he does peer inside. Mostly, there are filing cabinets, and other forms of storage, but after a while e, he happens upon white tile and the smell of rusty water.

Inside is full of lockers. Not even a meagre scrap of fabric separates the spigot heads from the open air. Scout's own footsteps alarm him, squeaking on the tile. He wonders, briefly, which locker is his. Most are open, or unlocked. They have names on –at least, all but one, where the name has been chipped off, but crudely, as if the culprit was in a hurry.

It sits between _Reznikov, M_ and _Janvier, P_. Inside the empty locker are some shotgun shells, collecting on the bottom shelf of the long, tin body, and a picture pasted in the back of some generic pin-up girl with her skirt thrown up and her face all surprised. Scout figures, he could leave that in there. He wouldn't mind that so much.

In the middle off the thought, he turns when he hears the march of footsteps –with many owners- and the laughter of a group.

It makes him cold for a second –the others, coming, and himself, trespassing all guilty on their belongings. He doesn't want to test out how understanding 'RED Group' are feeling.

Scout skids about on the tile, trying to quiet his damn feet, but there isn't any other way out. And he can hear they drawing nearer to the doorway. He isn't exactly sure what to do, or where to go –there isn't anywhere to go!

In a moment of desperation that he isn't exactly proud of, he tucks himself –quickly, with great panic, into the long, slim locker, and swings shut the small door. One grate lines up with the bottom of his nose, and it quiets his breathing a little. He can't see anything outside of the locker –nothing but the light being cast into the locker in thick bands of three.

The suspense is awful. Scout wishes, uselessly, that Seymour were with him. Seymour might have been a little absent near the end of his life, but he was a systematiser. He could always figure a way in or out. In the end, though, his disappearing act was disappointing. There was no magic to finding a body.

The thought abandons him almost instantly when they enter. He hears the telltale squelch of shoe on damp tile, and the laughter and sharp conversation. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what is being said. Scout can hear bits of the Midwest and of the hard south in some of the voices, and something else entirely in others. Above it all, distracting him, is the harsh stink of dirt, and gunpowder and blood. Worse than it had been when he arrived; more concentrated.

It doesn't sound like some of them were even speaking English. Great! –Scout shuffles in the locker with a grimace. He's going to be working with a bunch of foreign invalids

Either side of him, he can hear the rattle of the other locker doors opening. It quiets his breathing instantly. What a spot to be found in.

Scout prays that they don't open the locker up and find him –not because of where he is, but because he has no explanation for it. The moment of panic has passed and now he has been left in a painful and strange scenario.

The murmurs closest to him are childlike and hard to get at. With great perseverance, Scout tries to make out whole words, but ultimately fails, and is left focusing in the dark for no reason.

What the hell is he going to do? They'll find him. That's a certainty. They'll find him and then –well, he doesn't know. But after being out there for hours with guns and weapons, and whatever else Scout can only imagine, he's not sure what to expect. They're criminals, after all. Just like him, only more ruthless. Worse, somehow. 

He'll get through it. He has to. There's no going back home now. Not after hundreds of miles of dry, dry wasteland. He's sweating in a tin can because he doesn't know what to do.

"Goddamn it." He mutters, before he can even help it. The reaction is so natural that he doesn't realise his mistake until the time has passed. He cannot pull the definite sound back into his mouth. It hits the metal and travels. And suddenly, silence –the lung-swallowing kind, descends like a plague on the helpless.

The last thing he sees is the thick bands of light extinguish as shadow falls over them, before white hot light bursts into place of the locker door and Scout is pulled forward hard, onto the tile. When he looks up, his eyes burn, and he can see nothing.

That's when the shapes surrounding him burst into furious laughter.


	2. Sea-More

The man with the iron hand

After a thousand years in dark stillness, everything suddenly begins to move at an incredible rate.

Even for Scout, who has lived an entire life in fast-forward, struggles to process the sudden flash of detail, the laughter, the whispers, and the cold hand pulling him upright. He tries to focus on the face before him, a kind and round one.

The man's southern accent is a practical assault on Scout's east-coast sensibilities. "He ain't no BLU, if I ever saw one." Around him, a sense of concurrence spreads. Scout doesn't recognise the word. He wants to ask –to get out some words, but his voice is meek and rusty, and it starts up in slow-motion.

Behind him, an accusation. "He a civilian?"

"Looks like it." The man turns back to him, and stretches out his cold hand. "Name of-"

Scout backpedals so fast he nearly ends up falling again. Not once does he dare to touch the –the thing, out in front of him. The man with the iron hand doesn't seem a bit bothered by it. As if to demonstrate the good nature of the metal extremity, he flexes the fingers. "It's no cause for alarm, son."

Scout if thoroughly out of breath. His lungs are not equipped to issue oxygen as fast as he needs it. It's a very real concern that he'll do something awful, like faint.

"You mind tellin' us exactly why you took to hidin' in that locker?" The mirth is obvious in the man's voice. It makes Scout angry, but in the way a child becomes furious. There isn't a bit of man left in him.

"I was s'pposed t' –s'pposed t' go get a physical." The desperation in his voice is clear. But he fights the instinct to look pitiful, as he knows each one of the faces belongs to a criminal. Whatever they have done: they're not like him. They're different, somehow. Worse.

The silence extends. Some of them are now going back to undressing, and light patches of conversation resume.

The man with the iron hand is trying to help again. Scout doesn't know if he wants to accept it. For all he knows, the man could be the sort that strangles prostitutes and the like. The pleasant demeanour is probably as thick as a chocolate-coating. Ma always said that when the devil came, he's have nice hair and say he worked for Amnesty International.

"Miss Pauling tell you to do that? To go down to the infirmary?" Scout nods. He trusts his silence. The man with the iron hand rises, drawing to his full height, a few inches below Scout, and nods. "Right, son. You're with the Doc."

"It can wait."

Scout searches around for a face that fits the voice. None react, of course. The man clears his throat.

"Hey, Doc?"

A taller, older man turns. There is something spattered across his nose –too light o be just blood and too dark to be just dirt. It reaches the lens of his spectacles, obscuring one eye slightly. In the thickest, and most bizarre accent Scout has ever encounter, the man grumbles. "Is the patient dying?"

Scout says nothing. The iron-handed man sighs. "Well, no-"

"Is the patient under any chronic or acute pain? Any bleeding, fainting, vomiting or dizziness?"

The small man rolls his eyes. "Not that I'm aware of, no." But that doesn't stop the other man's stride.

"And are you quite certain that the patient's appendix won't burst, causing serious trauma?" The silence says enough for all of them. Pleased, the man turns, and gives them his long back once more. "Then it can wait."

Suffice it to say, it's not the warmest greeting Scout has ever been given. It is much easier to imagine what area of illicit activity the doctor has dabbled in, though, so Scout continues to keep his mouth shut. It's not a regular habit for him.

The smaller man has nothing else to say on the matter. He gives Scout a parting piece of advice. "You best go wait down by the doors for him, at the end of the hall." Scout nods, still mute, a if he is terribly enthusiastic about understanding the statement. As he goes, some last words follow him. "And don't go jumpin' into any more lockers, alright, son?"

-

Ma doesn't believe in doctors. Scout doesn't, either.

They all stopped believing when Seymour killed himself. After his time in Vietnam, he'd gone to that head doctor to stop feeling so sorry for himself. Nobody could say with any certainty if it was the war, the doctor, the drugs or just life that had made him out the gun to his head that day.

But dead is dead, regardless.

Scout doesn't trust the man's strange, alien accent. He doesn't trust the flutter of the birds, in the cage. Are they test subjects? Pets? He doesn't trust the low hum of the generators. Nor the diagrams on the walls, and the sterile, coy wink of instruments, sharp and essential as sunlight.

The man, who he is instructed to address simply as 'Medic', never quite catches his eye. The man glosses over him as one does a set of parts, or a task. As if, despite having such power over life and death has caused him not to idolise it, but to stop believing it's novelty altogether.

It happened to Seymour because of the war. It would have happened to Walt, too, Scout's only truly light-hearted brother, but he was shot to pieces on a muddy hill just three months after leaving home.

He tries not to think about it. He tries to start up some conversation.

"S'cold down here." Scout says. He rubs his hands together and breathes on them. "Nobody to foot the heatin' bill, huh?"

Medic says nothing. He seems comfortable giving the boy his back. As if the words are obviously unworthy of his time. The gargantuan man, Heavy, stands behind Scout, enormous arms crossed over one another, thick as tree trunks. It makes Scout so nervous that he has to speak.

"I guess you're jus' gonna check stuff, yeah? My eyes an' ears, an' all that?" The silence he's being met with i infuriating. "You gonna say anythin'?"

Medic waves a hand. "Can you see?"

Scout pauses short. He is unsure if the question is a trick. His eyes swivel around the room. Their detail is fine. "Sure," He says, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "I can see fine."

"And I presume you are able to hear me?"

Still, he remains facing away. It appears that he is washing his hands. Scout sighs. "Well, sure. Accent an' all."

Medic laughs at that. It is a short, sharp little bark, and then it goes, as if that's all the joy that the man has ever and will ever feel. "No need to check your eyes and ears, then." He clears his throat. "We may skip straight to the procedure."

Scout tenses, and takes a single step backwards before an enormous hand plants itself on his shoulder. He wants to speak, but cannot, his mouth trembling in a stutter. Questions ring like alarm bells in his head, and as he staggers backwards he feels the brick wall of body behind him.

Medic sighs. "Don't start panicking now. It's all standard."

Scout's mouth is very dry. He tries to steady himself, but the panic is instantaneous and intolerable. It's only worsened when Medic turns, advancing with gloved hands, a long needle poised in his left hand. That's when Scouts starts, terrified, feeling two massive arms circle around him like stone, fixing him in place.

Scout starts to kick violently. It's useless –useless, he knows, but he has to do something. Every step closer causes him to become more violent. He doesn't trust that Medic, with the strange look in his eyes, and the manic, half-open smile as if he takes pleasure in Scout's distress.

In his desperation, he manages to free one single hand, and stretches it out, as if to fight or bat away the advancing man.

"Kommen jetzt, Junge." The man says, near-fondly, twisting Scout's hand up, rendering it useless in his grip. The needle slips near-painlessly into his upper-arm. That's it. That's all it is. In the strangest, softest voice, Medic sighs to him, "Dies ist nicht der Zeitpunkt für Feinde."

He releases Scout's arm, that goes soft and limp, a lax fist falling onto the man's shoulder. Scout's vision begins to soften, as if seeing the world through seawater eyes. Afraid, he tries to swim up, or pull away, but can do nothing but fall against Heavy behind him.

He feels his head fall back. They move towards the examination table. He is not conscious of being placed upon it. Then, there are blue eyes above him. He thinks that it's Ma, at first, singing him to sleep as a child, but there is something vaguely sinister about the echo of her voice. She is further away than it seems.

Scout's eyes close.

When they open, he perceives himself laying at the bottom of a lake. Above him, Seymour's tags are floating. It takes all of his strength to reach up a single arm. One finger closes around them, but the chain shifts in the water, and they start to float away, and higher. Scout doesn't dare to lose them.

Slowly, he kicks his feet, and pushes himself off of the bedrock. The water sustains him and he swims up, not conscious of breathing. Only of Seymour's tags. The trouble is, they're fast. As much as he propels himself further and faster and harder it isn't fast enough.

Scout doesn't give up. He follows them higher, to the light green waters, where bean green pours over blue. The tags become stuck, and at last, he seizes an opportunity to grab one of them. It sits hard in his wrist as he jerks them towards him. But the more he jerks, his efforts bear no fruit. With one hard tug, Scout pulls himself to the surface, gasping suddenly, as if it is his first breath.

Suddenly, there is no water. No lake. The tags are looped around Seymour's neck. He's pale and bluish, his temple bloody and oozing black blood. His eyes are practically dead.

Scout drops the tags. He staggers back with a stomach full of bile. He turns away.

"Go away." He grins out, over his shoulder. "I don't need you anymore." But Seymour doesn't leave. He remains standing there, half-aware, with that goddamn awful half-smile on his face. Scout wishes it had never existed.

Seymour is still there when he turns back around. "Ma doesn't talk about you no more." He says, quietly. "She doesn't need you. Nobody does!" In a moment of weakness, he shoves Seymour hard, but doesn't move the man. His voice dissolves back into a hard, venomous whisper. "Jus' go away!"

Seymour never says a word, and Scout has no other course of action left but to scream.

"Goddamnit Seymour, leave!"

-

Later, on dry land, he wakes up with a dry cough.

His chest is dull and warm, but doesn't actively hurt. It leads him to suppose that's where most of his 'procedure' took place. Medic isn't in immediate sight, and so Scout's anger dissipates. The day has worn on, and he wants to have a warm meal, a hot shower, and a cold bed. A phonecall, too, just to get his affair in order.

Ma had asked him to write her. She's said –even though he wasn't a great writer like Seymour, and couldn't read all that well anyway, he ought to squeeze out a couple of words for her. Just to tell her he was okay.

Scout has been told not to tell lies. He isn't okay at all, and so he decides against writing to her until he can muster the strength to lie. To make her believe everything is okay.

Slowly, feeling like a very sorry man, he slides himself off of the examination table and stands. His legs are trembling, but he manages to walk himself over to the mirror, eager but terrified to see the damage.

On his upper arm is a small red pinprick, no bigger than a star at night, but there is otherwise nothing. No gaudy marks or scars. No poppy bruises or jagged lines. Not a hint of blood. Naively, he believes that he's fine until a sharp and seizing pain makes his chest give, and he clutches it, swearing sharply. A deep wheeze scares him, but it does lessen the pain.

He is caught in the act.

"Mister Daley." He hears her voice before turning. What a dissonant chord Miss Pauling is. Words tough as iron but a look soft as leather. "I trust you're acclimatising yourself."

He laughs at that, but turns, fearing that he'll be perceived as rude if he doesn't face her. "It's jus' Scout."

She does no return the smile. Her mouth, in a hard straight line, does not so much as flicker. "If it's all the same to you, I think I'll leave it at Mister Daley." She crosses around a small table and places a wrapped brown paper package on the table Scout had been lying. "Your uniform."

Scout crosses over to it, and tears away the top layer of soft brown. He's met with bright red fabric. "Uh," He coughs, again. "Thanks."

She folds her arms. "It's regulation." And then, as if realising how cold she sounds, she continues. "I have the key to your room. You can unpack in there before dinner."She hands him a small, silver fob attached to a small pool ball. His room number, presumably. "Dinner is mandatory. It's at seven. Breakfast is at eight. Be punctual, or don't eat."

He tries careful to process everything she's told him, afraid to make a mistake. She is impossible to read. A naturally soft, and once-smiling face is obscured by her harsh eyes and straight mouth and meticulously neat hair. He cannot guess or tell a lie apart from who she is or once was, and doesn't dare to.

She departs then, her heels snapping on the tile like an empty lighter. Over her shoulder, she says, "Goodnight, Mister Daley." And he is left to find his own room.

In the next room, the eponymous Medic is whistling, boots hooked by the heel as he leans back in his chair, polishing some kind of scalpel. Behind him, Heavy is rubbing the man's shoulders as he whistles. Scout feels like such an intruder to cross the floor, facing down. The tiles are slightly blurry. His vision is still soft.

The whistling pauses. "The procedure was a success." He says, to Scout. "Though, I was generous with your anaesthetic. You've been out most of the day."

He still doesn't know what the procedure was. Or why he had to undergo it. Frankly, he's too nervous to ask.

-  
With whatever earthly possessions he has left with him, Scout finds a long corridor of doors, and eventually, room six.

Scout is raw with exhaustion. He envisions a soft bed, and time alone, and a chance to sort out his stiff, hard neck from that awful sleep on the shuttle. He's so terribly tired, and wants a chance to sleep without such strange dreams. It's only been a matter of hours and he's tired of RED base and it's strange, hostile inhabitants.

He unlocks the door with relative ease and sighs, stepping inside and going to the bed that he sees. The sheets are white, but the walls are red. As he goes to reach out a hand, to touch the sheets, disbelieving that they're really there, he hears the scrape of something on the wooden floor, and realises at once that there's someone behind him.

Suddenly, there's something terribly cold at his throat and his every instinct thrills as the essential blade of some long, dangerous knife makes itself known to him. Without hesitation, Scout's hands fly up to his collar to moment the blade tightens around him. It takes less than a second for the blade to begin eating through the skin of his hands. Scout cries out in panic.

"Who the hell are you?" Comes the hot, foreign whisper to his left. Scout tries to squirm away, gasping out in pain. The blade has stopped moving forward, but his hands are still incredibly tender,  
blood beginning to come in two ugly slices. "Who gave you that key?"

"M-Miss Paulin'!" He whimpers, trying to stagger backwards. "She told me that this was –this was my room..."

The man behind him pauses. At a rate of tiny increments, the blade withdraws and Scout is shoved onto the bed in front of him. Breathless, and emotionally exhausted, Scout steadies himself, leaving poppy-red marks blooming on the crisp, white sheets as he sits himself on the bed. Half-wheezing, Scout licks his hand sourly and glances up at his assailant.

The man is tall, thin, and doesn't look a bit sorry when he says, "Key or no key, you're gonna knock." The use of imperative isn't lost on Scout, who, as the younger, smaller and newer, feels that telltale urge to obey, soundlessly and wordlessly. His alert had numbed the pain of his hands, but now that his breathing is evening out, the sting is returning to his palms. They cannot curl without causing further bleeding.

When Scout looks back up at that man, unable to read anything from the careful fortified defence of hard, yellows instead of eyes. The man straightens visibly under the scrutiny.

"She tell you if this arrangement was temporary or not?"

Scout shakes his head. "She didn't even tell me I was gonna be sharin'."

Some might be inclined to sympathy on Scout's case. Because he swears, he isn't like them. He stumbled upon all of his crimes, all of those grand theft autos and nasty scraps over nothing. At least in his own mind, Scout is an innocent, corrupted by entirely external forces. It doesn't seem to occur to the stranger. That's because the stranger is a criminal.

"You sure better hope this arrangement's temporary." He grumbles, brusquely. Arms akimbo, he shakes his head. "Either way, you better keep to your side a' the room." He raises a finger as if earning Scout. "Don't leave your shit out. I don't-" For a second, the hand in the air waivers. "I don't do mess."

Scout wonders, very briefly, if the man is here, incarcerated and locked up, deemed a danger to the public, because he killed his previous roommate over mess. It doesn't sound totally improbable.

He tries to muster his strongest voice beneath the rubble of the day, clearing his throat dryly. "I'll-" He coughs, again. "You won't even notice I'm here. I'll be quiet as a goddamn corpse."

It's the first time in days he's seen another human being laugh. It isn't a large or golden sound.; the man's shoulder lift and fall in a single, amused chuckle. It's enough for him to be reminded that even if he isn't one of them, they are still vaguely human. Scout doesn't offer much more than that, though. The imminent and very real threat of the blade has left enough of a mark to dissuade him from chattering too much.

In fact, all he can say is, "I don't guess you got any bandages or nothin'? S'jus', you cut my hands up pretty bad an' all."

The tall stranger plants himself firmly on the bed across from Scout and roots his hand around in the drawer besides the bed. As he goes to turn away, a white roll of bandage knocks him on the shoulder. Gingerly, he grasps it in his palm, feeling the weave of the fabric against the moist tenderness of his palm.

"Just this once, alright?" the man grunts, now fully turned away. "Don't be expecting any bloody handouts."

Scout expects nothing. He hums in agreement and unravels the roll, stretching out his left hand first and wrapping the cut up neatly, covering his hand from his knuckles down to the middle of his wrist. He does the same with the right, too, holding them up afterwards to admire his own handiwork. It's probably not the most efficient or effective means, but the end result has an aesthetic he could get used to.

It takes him all of about ten minutes until they're finished and reasonably tight. When he turns towards the other bed, attempting to give the remainder of the bandages back, he finds the tall man lying limp on the bed, the long brim of a hat over his eyes.

Scout doesn't say a word for fear of disturbing the other man: he's sleeping.

At the end of the small room are two identical desks parallel to eachother. Scout occupies the small chair and tests the stationery provided. The paper is thin. The ink is an awful dark red, but he tries his best to get something out. After all, he doesn't want Ma thinking he's dead.

The pen feels like a deadweight in his hand –a gutterball. He never could write like Seymour, and has trouble putting the words together, before the letters fall apart. There's a fancy word for it, that the school nurse used to use; Ma called it stupid. It would take him a miracle to have words to look at.

Scout knows he has to write something, but fears he doesn't want to depress her with chronicles of the painful, confusing and altogether sinister nature of his days so far. When he tries to write, his hand shakes.

_'Ma, I am here at New Mexico. It is hot and sandy.'_

It takes him several hours to write those 12 words. 


	3. Are you dying comfortably?

By the time seven o'clock rolls around, Scout has never been less hungry is his whole life.

There are no clocks around base. The window in his shared rooms tells of light at all times, making it impossible to tell truly which wide of north the sun is falling. The only way left to tell is how the shadows fall, rising in front, invisible, or lagging behind.

Scout isn't all that smart. He knows what time it is, because after a while, the sleeping man rises, pulling his hat back, revealing alert eyes.

Still hunched over those twelve pathetic words, Scout is eager for an excuse to leave. "What time is it?"

The man at the door looks sourly at him. Scout suspects –silently, against his habit, that that's just what the desert has fixed the man like. He tries not to take the look personally. "S'dinner. Seven."

The door is breathing a slice of air –physically and otherwise. He needs no persuading in standing up, and following the other man out of the room and down the corridor. Despite their previous encounter, fresh as the bleeding every time Scout curls his palms, the stranger is the lesser of all other evils he's encountered: between the taciturn Miss Pauling, the iron-handed man, the manic doctor and his 'lab assistant', a few cuts are nothing.

Hell, if the rest of Scout's inmates follow the same pattern, he might do well to consider himself old friends with the new roommate.

Scout stays close on the man's elbow. He has many questions. Starting with. "You got a name, hey? I jus' figure since we're gonna be pretty close quarters an' all, it'd make sense if-"

The tall man pauses mid-stride and shakes his head. "Stop," He sighs. "No names." At first, Scout doesn't understand. No names? Nothing to call eachother by? And then when the man continues, things become transparent. "M'Sniper."

It becomes clear to him then. Just like with Medic. A class title. No different from a rank. He sticks out his hand in an over-genial manner and smiles. "I'm Scout."

He doesn't know if he's broken the rule with names. But Scout doesn't know his class title or his rank. All he has is his name, now.

The man continues walking, faster, as if trying to escape Scout. But he's not some tenacious hound snapping at the man's heels; he's just a boy with questions. He keeps up as best he can without seeming desperate or hurried. In his most breezy tone, he tries for a question. "You been here long?"

Sniper sighs in a quick, single breath. The man is precise about everything, which is why Scout struggles with the ambiguity of the answer. "A while, sure."

It's clear that the man doesn't feel like talking, but that's alright. Scout usually feels like talking enough for two or more people. "What did'ja do to get landed in here?" At the man's bemusement, Scout gestures a hand, awkwardly. There is no pleasant way to ask somebody what their greatest mistake is.

Curiously enough, it is the first time Scout thinks he has imposed on anybody. The man had been bold enough to physically assault him, and yet, the question causes him to retreat back within himself: his shoulders squaring, his movements becoming sharper and less natural.

And all he says is, "I don't really remember it."

And that's all he has to say for Scout to go silent and fall back ever-so-slightly, because he knows, just as Sniper does, that he remembers all of it. He just doesn't like to say.

-

Scout remembers asking Walt, once, before the war, why none of them ever had any time for Seymour. He has never forgotten the answer: Walt turned around and told him what his platoon leader had told him. 'Lions walk with lions, kid. Not hyenas'.

Nothing has changed, even after all these years.

At one end of the table, Scout comes to recognise the Americans. The iron-handed man sits opposite a taller, more serious figure with a no-nonsense buzz cut. At his shoulder is the gargantuan man, sitting opposite the dour Medic. They exist within their own vacuum.

Despite the fact that the others are sitting next to them, they appear separately. They are distinctly un-american. Sniper is among their number. He sits on the end and begins eating at a measured pace. He does not look up. Besides him, there is little apparent conversation between the smoker and the one covered entirely in flameproof asbestos, down to the optical gas mask. It's a hell of a spooky thing.

Some habits never die. He sees a metal hand waving to him, and figures that if the lions' den is the place he choose to call home he cannot complain.

To his dismay, there is a seat waiting for him. While that doesn't necessarily comfort him, it's motivation enough to take a seat between the iron-handed man and his serious friend. They are already mid-conversation, which laves him in a more delicate situation. In his experiences, it has always been far more draining to listen than to talk.

Though, he supposes in a house of nine others, having to scream to get your voice heard does cause one to develop bad habits.

Once settled down, Scout looks down at the plate in front of him, and recognises the meal immediately as some kind of casserole. He knows that if he treats it as fuel rather than as food, he's more likely to get through it without offending the chef. But there isn't time to be overly-cautious. With a frightening geniality, the iron hand closes around Scout's and gives him a good, firm shake.

"We didn't get a chance to be acquainted b'fore Doc got his hands on ya. Name of Engineer." Scout retracts his hand, dumbfounded, and nods. Then the man gestures besides him, to the taller man. "This here's Soldier."

"Uh," He looks around as if waiting for the right words to appear. "Uh, yeah. M'Scout." Lifting his fork, he gazes vaguely at themes on his plate. Where the conversation had been strained before, Scout finds the silence even less tolerable, and has to ask before he can put the question nicely. "What happened to your hand?"

Where Scout had feared some defensiveness, Engineer laughs very plainly. "This ol' thing?" The metal digits flex. It is almost unnerving. "Well, I fixed it."

What could the man have possibly done to his hand that would call for it to be 'fixed'? In what line of work does a man destroy one of his appendages beyond repair, only to be replaced by cool, lifeless metal? Scout wants to smile at him, and be friendly; he really does, but finds himself with less of a marked desire for food and socialisation.

Sensing Scout's sudden caution, the man leans on the side of safer statements. He finishes a mouthful of food and says, "If you need anythin' fixin', I'm your man."

Scout nods. He pushes around another forkful of food and puts the fork down, sensing the pain curling in the flat palm of his hand. The cut must be deeper than it first appeared. The man across from Engineer has been observing Scout pushing around his food in the way one moves chess pieces in a losing game: with a discernible disinterest.

It takes a second for the man to realise all of Scout's nightmares when the man points his fork at the tags.

"Where'd you serve, son?"

They never heard to which front Seymour got sent. Nor Walt. After landing in Da Nang, it was a blur of letters made intelligible through the censor. Talk about hot weather and jungles and boys with foreign names. And when Walt died and they sent Seymour home, he used to tell Scout about the humidity; of the soldiers passing out in line, and the children running from towns where the Agent Orange had burnt through their clothes and skin.

Ma said that they were heroes. She loved all of those sins, right up until the day Seymour got his blue discharge. It might well have been his ticket to God.

She sent him away, first. All of her boys sat in an office where the doctor talked through Seymour's sickness. Told them all about this fancy parlour trick he had prepared: a transorbital lobotomy.

They put him full of pills and told him if he didn't get better, they'd put a hole in his head, and Seymour would lose everything that made him think. All of that poetry and all of those big words gone.

When he got out, Seymour was sweet on this nurse for a little while. He made a big show of it to Ma, and took her to the beach and everything. When that nurse was asleep in their room, Seymour started writing a little note. He loaded his gun.

It turned out that they never needed a doctor to put a hole in Seymour's head. Not when he was willing to do it himself.

Scout realises that he's gone through it all, again. That he's silent at the table. Unresponsive to the man's question. As if they are somehow tainted, Scout takes off the tags and outs them on the table. He sighs.

"No." He shakes his head. "They was my brother's. I never went –I was jus' a kid an' all."

Soldier smiles. "I bet he gave those commies a screwing they never forgot, hey, son?"

It isn't polite to bring up the dead in conversation. And Scout knows that the man means well, so he nods. He doesn't speak of the snow that fell last winter.

"Him an' Walt both. Made my Ma real proud." He's sung that tune, note for note, so many times to so many people. And today, it doesn't lose an inch of vim or vigour. But always –every time, he makes the concept separate. It's between Walt and Seymour and Ma, and Scout will play no part in it.

For the rest of the meal, Scout pushes the food around his plate and half-listens to Soldier talking, at great length, amount war, and greatness as if they are no more separated than birth and blood. He doesn't take the talk personally at all.

If he's going to be walking with lions, he had sure better start acting like one.

-

For a second, when Scout wakes he thinks he's at home.

No dreams about Seymour. No disturbances. He wakes rested and peaceful, yawning softly, half-expecting one of his brothers to be snoring across from him. Hence, he wakes up smiling, turning over just as a harsh sunrise hisses through the window. A thin strip catches him on the eyelids and shoots his black vision full of gold. For all he knows in these few seconds, he could be free and home.

When his eyes open, he realises it. From the Triple-glazed glass to the furious heat of the New Mexico morning to the man across from him: he is a long way from home.

Crestfallen, Scout pushes himself up to sitting and sighs. He rubs his eyes and walks over to the window in his underwear. The view outside is white-hot. Only vague shapes break the terrible sunlight. He can see other signs of life stirring from across the bridge.

Scout murmurs to himself. "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

-

In the day, they fight. Just like he had seen on arrival: the fray is as chaotic and expansive as one could dream. Yet somehow worse.

There is no induction. No explanation, or previous warning. They give him very vague instructions, about the blue building across the courtyard and a suitcase. It's an elaborate equivalent of fetch, and he doesn't mind it a bit.

At least, not until he's given the first gun.

It strikes a very dissonant chord in Mss Pauling's little fingers, her painted nails wrapped around the stock. She handles it with ease.

"You needn't bother to aim with it. The shells have a nice spread." Her voice is always very serious, and very pressing. Each sentence is brief, but penetrating all the same. Scout takes in the weight of the gun. It's very unsettling. The trigger seems so easy to squeeze.

He considers it, for just a second. The consequence of such a simple action. It sits very strangely with him. "I ain't no killer –an' I ain't sure this is right."

She looks at him, very plainly. "I wouldn't call it killing, exactly. They have explained to you about the respawn system here, haven't they?"

Nothing springs to mind. He wonders if it has anything to do with that very surreal experience in the infirmary, with the Medic and his needle and all of that pain in Scout's chest. Otherwise, everything has been relatively standard. And however strange the men around him seem, they don't seem like the type to be killers.

The silence serves as his answer. "Don't worry, Mister Daley, the concept is relatively simple."

That's all she says. All she leaves him with, before directing him to a bright, tiled room full of the rest of them. Armed with a rudimentary form of shotgun, and a snub-nosed lugermorph, he joins the rest of the, feeling suddenly underqualified. He isn't one of them. He does not have enough experience with nefarious activity to feel comfortable.

Out of desire for the known, he sticks to Sniper's elbow, and does the talking.

"I don't get it," He confesses, quietly. "What's the point in all this?"

The man is armed with a very long, scoped rifle. The blade responsible for his hands is sheathed at the man's hip, and he looks relatively –at ease. As if repeating the first part in a very mundane cycle. The man folds his arms as if conversation makes his mood visibly sour.

"You jus' worry about that briefcase." He says, finally. Scout straightens.

"What briefcase?"

Sniper sighs. His voice is very quiet, and his body never loses it's rigidity. It's as if he has trained himself to be alert for something that cannot be seen plainly, or easily recognised. "They got one, an' we got one. All you gotta do is get theirs, an' bring it back."

Scout considers the simplicity of the order. Just like being on the track team again. He knows that's he's fast –no question. But there's one thing still puzzling him. He leans into the man, smelling faint coffee, and heat that Boston doesn't talk of.

"What the hell I need a gun for, then?" He looks up at Sniper, and sees the tiniest crack in the stone wall when one corner of his mouth curls, slightly.

"Let's just say, they don't want you to get it."

-

When he leaps out, onto the platform of RED base, the terror begins.

Mid-morning sun hangs faintly in the east and leaves the whole team blind. Almost immediately, the rattle of guns and the collective chutzpah of footsteps make Scout feel smaller. He looks for someone to follow, out in the open, watching one of the Americans –Soldier, heading out towards the bridge.

He squints, unable to see exactly where the man is heading. He's only there for a second –just a second, and that's all it takes.

Across from him, someone lets an arrow fly, and Scout is thrown back by the force of it The broadhead tears right through the muscle of his upper-arm and feels as if it goes right on through. There isn't much blood –the shaft is buried, largely sealing the wound. His arm is rendered useless immediately. He tries, futilely, to lift it, but the pain tears up through him.

Scout cannot control himself –he screams.

Staggering backwards, and finding wood hitting his back, he lifts the arm with his other, and tries, uselessly, to assess the damage. He's still making these pathetic, pained noises, breathing very hard. There's no use trying to pull the arrow out. It's likely fractures the bone where the broadhead has pierced him, and now some thick, black blood is starting to come in very small rivulets.

Desperate with panic, he tugs on the shaft, hissing in pain. Eventually, the shaft moved further out, but snaps suddenly, and it causes the pain to grow even more intense and furious. His head snaps up, and he squints in the terrible sunlight, trying to identify the guilty party, but gets no chance to.

He doesn't even hear another fly. But it does.

The first thing he feels is a very swift force, like a punch in the throat, and it winds him so violently that he croaks, audibly. His throat begins to burn, as if with some kind of acid, and he gasps out, falling forward onto his knees, supporting himself with one hand and tugging at is collar with the other.

Then, he begins to convulse violently, as he realises that the arrow is buried in his neck. Rather than taking breaths, these horrible gurgling sounds bubble up from his throat. He starts to cough and hack up the blood from the wound, before tearing out the arrow, and halving what would have been left of his suffering anyway. He is conscious for a pyroclasm of blood to begin dribbling down his neck and wetting his shirt.

The blood is going everywhere. His hands are covered in the arterial spray. Scout doesn't want to die. He's not ready.

Is this his punishment? Scout thinks about Ma getting a letter. He thinks about the rest of them: Buddy, Waker, Danny, Frankie, Tony, all lining up behind her promising to look after her. And Scout never got to all of the things he wanted –never saw any of the world, never did anything worth doing –never finished that damn letter he was writing.

He manages to pull himself, sobbing, crying out, towards a pair of feet, and grabs hold of them, uselessly. Blood soaks into the denim he's clinging to and makes it tacky with dirt.

Scout goes to say something –he isn't sure what, but just something to serves as his last damn testament. Looking up, he sees a slice of light blue, and there's the smallest amount of sympathy in Sniper's mouthful of gravel.

"Oh, kid." He says. And that's all he needs to.

It' the last thing Scout perceives –the man crouching, using one hand to hold Scout's chin, staring down at him before his vision judders and everything begins to turn monochrome, to grey, and then at last to black.

Then Scout begins to fall.

He sees nothing, so the sensation is entirely physical. It's cold, and he feels as if he continues to pick up velocity. He cannot be going faster, and yet he feels he's going at lightspeed, and will never stop. As he falls, the darkness becomes lighter and lighter, the grey reversing, his weakness fading. Light appears from somewhere, until, unbelievably, he sees something.

A light. Just a suspicion of a light.

His speed continues to increase, drastically, until he comes afraid, the air on his face bitter and essential as ice. He falls faster and faster and harder and harder until-

Scout feels as if he lands in his shoes with such intention that his ankles practically shatter. He arrives in the land of the living so hard that his senses become overloaded, and stumbles forward, feeling so incredibly nauseous that before he is fully conscious, he vomits, straight and hard and hot onto the tile.

He looks around, dizzily, for someone to explain to him. Scout doesn't understand –he felt it, he died! Was it just a daydream? Or has he been somehow resurrected? Did he ever die to begin with?

After a few moments, a shadow appears behind him, and the smaller of the Americans –of which Scout doesn't number himself –appears. He helps Scout up to standing and smiles at him.

"First time respawning's a real kick from a mule, but it'd be worse without it." Engineer lops his thumbs into his pockets and nods. He gestures towards the door and sighs. "After you, partner."

What can he do? Without a word, Scout goes.

-

Things do not get better from there, but worse.

Scout kills his first man.

It is late afternoon by the time he does. The sunset has gone from terrible to a split yolk, bleeding out low over RED base's shoulder. Scout emerges from the base across the courtyard, momentarily lost, looking round for an exit strategy. He has what they sent him for –the little blue suitcase, belching white paper like slander into the dirt.

The paper trail gives him away. Scout goes to take a strong leap towards the roof of the bridge, and gets both feet off of the ground when something snags him backwards.

No –not something. _Someone._

A hand grabs a fistful of collar and heaves him backwards, throwing him against the wall. All of the air goes out of him in a single, nasty cough. Scout scrambles for his feet, desperately. Paper obscures his vision of his assailant, but he continues to struggle, trying to get upwards, and away and out –he doesn't want to die.

A heavy foot plants itself on his back and prevents him from rising. Scout is terrified –he batters his legs and torso wildly, crying out as if expecting help when he knows none will ever come. In the panic, he manages to turn slightly, freeing up one of his arms and tugging the ankle out from under his assailant. The man falls don hard onto Scout's back, and they go for eachother, clawing and punching.

Scout feels the man's nails drag across his closed eye and he kicks hard, projecting the man off of him as he scrambles for the briefcase, more interested in a getaway than a murder. As he comes to standing, he hears an awful crunch and falls down, winded by the side of a bat. His ribs feel as if they have caught alight, and his breaths come in tiny, knifelike pants.

His assailant advances, and Scout has had enough.

He grapples with the man, biting hard at his hands until the bat is freed –rolling away and nearly falling off of the damn ledge. As he reaches out an arm to grab for it, his bicep is crushed hard by the other man's foot. He only has a second to respond, and uses it wisely, aiming his foot neatly between the man's legs and using all the force he can muster. The poor bastard doesn't stand a chance . He staggers back, and Scout' arm is free at last.

The muscle memory comes back to him very quickly: he swings hard and cracks the man jaw in an even swing, a spray of blood exploding from the man's lips. Scout is still terrified. He doesn't want to die again. He just want to get back. In his panic, he continues to swing, hearing the blunt ring of metal of bone, hearing the crack of fractures and feeling the resistance from his target falling away, until there is none. A spray of blood has caught him all up the arms, and on his hands, and hot on his face. It burns.

The man doesn't move, or grunt. It takes Scout a minute to realise it: he's dead.

Worse than that, Scout's chest is heaving. He feels good. This awful side of him has surfaced. Now the bat is starting to feel comfortable in his hands. He doesn't feel afraid, but instead, the rush of endorphins, and pleasure.

Scout has been one of them all along, hasn't he?

He looks once more onto the face of his assailant, a young thing not dissimilar to him, made unrecognisable and horrifying at the hands of Scout's brutality. _Oh, God,_ he thinks, before retching suddenly and heaving thin, green bile onto the dirt.

Horrified, Scout crawls away on his ass backwards, and then starts wiping furiously at his hands. This isn't him –it isn't! He never had it in him before, and he's not like the rest of them, he's moral and good and clean. God, there's so much blood on him, he'll never be clean again-...

He picks himself up, after a while. He's always had to. With trembling hands, he takes the briefcase, and makes like hell for the safety of RED base.

For now, it's all he has.


End file.
